8 exciting uses for wearable tech that will blow your mind

Forget peculiar smartwatches, geeky glasses and simple fitness bands, the future of wearable technology will include plenty of twists and turns that see this exciting new category expand into areas many people haven’t even considered at this point. Early use cases for the various wearable computing devices we have seen thus far have been pretty obvious for the most part — glasses that put a display in your field of vision, digital watches that connect to our smartphones, fitness tracking wrist bands that are little more than pedometers, and so on. But the future of this new category is indeed bright, and a recent analysis brings to light eight compelling use cases for wearable technology that will blow your mind.

Some recent research offered by FutureStructure suggests that the most interesting and compelling applications for wearable computing devices will come from the combination of three distinct and important elements: advanced wearable products (body sensors, smart glasses and smartwatches), artificial intelligence (early examples include Siri, Google Now and Microsoft’s upcoming offering “Cortana”) and big data.

“Whether it is the location of an individual, data about an individual’s search history or ad preferences or even information about what that person was looking at 30 days ago there is no shortage of data,” FutureStructure’s Andrew Sheehy noted. “If developers can gain opt-in programmatic access to very granular data about a user’s behavior – a goal that is extremely important to Google – then a whole panorama of new service possibilities will open up.”

With those things in mind, the paper poses eight mind-blowing use cases for wearable technology that could completely change the way we live. Examples include in-body sensors for blood chemistry monitoring that could act as an early warning system and help improve diagnoses, smart glasses that help law enforcement officials while they’re in pursuit of a suspect, or even in-body sensors that monitor nutrition and help improve users’ diets.

We won’t spoil all the details, though. Head over to FutureStructure, which is linked below in our source section, for some very interesting thoughts on where wearable technology might be headed.